Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)

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The technical section of the village pump is used to discuss technical issues about Wikipedia. Bugs and feature requests should be made at BugZilla since there is no guarantee developers will read this page.

Newcomers to the technical village pump are encouraged to read these guidelines prior to posting here. Questions about MediaWiki in general should be posted at the MediaWiki support desk.

Frequently Asked Questions: (also see Wikipedia:Technical FAQ)

• Intermittent database lags can make new articles take some minutes to appear, and cause the watchlist, contributions, and page history/old views sometimes not show the very latest changes. This is an ongoing issue we are working on.
• The search index is often out of date, sometimes taking weeks before it's updated. Because of that, recent changes are not immediately reflected on the search.
• If all the links in the articles suddenly become underlined (or the opposite), or red links instead end with a red question mark (or the opposite), or paragraphs are fully justified instead of left justified (or the opposite), it's probably because your browser failed to load one of the stylesheets (or the server sent you a wrong one). Do a forced reload or bypass your cache.
• If you have problems making your fancy signature work, check Wikipedia:How to fix your signature.
• If you changed to another skin and cannot change back, use this link.
• It has been reported that the Google Toolbar extension for the Firefox browser is the source of some strange problems (including blanking part of a page when editing it). If you have that extension, try turning it off or upgrading to a newer version. See bugzilla:5643 for more information.
• If an image thumbnail is not showing, try purging its image description page (if the image is from Wikimedia Commons, you might have to purge there too). If it doesn't work, try again.
• Some adblockers, proxies, or firewalls block URLs containing /ad/ or ending in common executable suffixes. This can cause some images or articles to not appear. Also, it's surprisingly common for people to accidentally block the image server (upload.wikimedia.org) on Firefox.
• If the section edit links are being pushed down by floated images, check Wikipedia:How to fix bunched up edit links.
• If you are asked to download a file (index.php) when trying to edit, or your browser launches an image editor when trying to edit, disable "Use external editor" on your preferences.
• Some ISPs use transparent proxies which cause problems logging in. If you find that you are automatically logged out just after you have logged in, and removing all your wikipedia cookies does not fix the issue, try using the secure server (much slower) to bypass the proxy. This happens most often with some satellite ISPs (particularly HughesNet/DirecWay/DirecPC).

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PNG Compression

I don't think Wikipedia does it when generating thumbnails. Why not? -SharkD 14:06, 24 October 2006 (UTC)

I'm just guessing here but probably because using a full 24 bit palette gives much better results when resizing images, with a bigger palette you can retain more details on a smaller area, thus thumbnail images (usualy) don't look like utter crap (compare PNG and GIF thumbnails). Pluss running more advanced optimalisation routines on the images would probably cost more CPU power than the saved bandwidth is worth. --Sherool (talk) 20:06, 24 October 2006 (UTC)

PNG images can be 24 or 32 bit and still benifit from compression. You'd think the thumbnails only need to be compressed once after editing a page that links them. However, if WP creates the thumbnails each time a visitor loads a page, I could see how the CPU issue would arise. -SharkD 01:35, 25 October 2006 (UTC)

Image thumbnails are, of course, aggressively cached. Nevertheless, CPU is usually a bigger cost for us than bandwidth, AFAIK. More to the point, I don't think anyone's gotten around to fixing this. —Simetrical (talk • contribs) 06:53, 26 October 2006 (UTC)

All PNG images are compressed; there is no support for uncompressedimages in the PNG spec. --brion 12:05, 27 October 2006 (UTC)

I assume SharkD meant that PNGs aren't appropriately palleted and so forth. Although reading his second post I'm less sure. —Simetrical (talk • contribs) 02:19, 29 October 2006 (UTC)

What I think SharkD is worrying about is that wikipedia needs to take up processor speed to resize large images every time somebody loads a page which shows that image in a different resolution. As far as I can tell, images are typically resized on the client side. Ever seen a small image on a fast webpage load real slow? Why would a small image load slow? Because the server actually holds the image as a big one, and it's sending all the data over to you for your browser to resize it.If images were normally resized on the server side, small images would always be sent over fast, though they wouldn't be there for a second or two while the server calculates the re-size. Wikipedia doesn't use up processing speed for making thumbnails, because it doesn't resize the images. It sends the image over in it's full size (which takes up lots of bandwidth), and tells the user's browser to resize it. As simetrical noted, bandwidth isn't the big concern for wikipedia right now, but automatically resizing every image uploaded to a bunch of different resolutions (like flickr does) would use up processor time, which is at a premium right now. So although the current system of no-precreated-thumbnails sometimes results in your browser taking a while to get all the image data of a huge image, it's simpler and easier on the servers as a whole for wikimedia to not have to resize and reprocess every image uploaded. -Monk of the highest order 01:06, 6 November 2006 (UTC)

I think you'll find you are wrong here. Wikipedia does create thumbnails/resize on the server. No client-side resizing is done. Have a look at the following copies of Image:Archilochus-alexandri-002-edit.jpg which I generated just now: 800px, 321px, 53px. If you look at the properties of the images, you will see that the file size is successively smaller. --TheParanoidOne 06:20, 6 November 2006 (UTC)

Yes, I'm afraid Monk is quite wrong in this case; resizing is server-side. All thumbnails are 24-bit (32-bit?) colour and use rather naive selection of PNG mode/settings, so that the PNGs are for many images too large. I have long suggested that flags be added to the image syntax to fine-tune these settings - at least the bits per pixel. Deco 06:29, 6 November 2006 (UTC)

Navigation bar

As far as I can tell, template:Navigation bar is now ready for use (works with IE, Firefox, Mozilla, Opera, Safari, and JAWS). It lets you turn a navigation box like this (old version of template:Footer Olympic Champions 4x400 m Men)

Olympic medalists in athletics (men) | Olympic champions in men's 4x400 m relay

1912 United States Mel Sheppard, Edward Lindberg, Ted Meredith, Charles Reidpath 1920 Great Britain Cecil Griffiths, Robert Lindsay, John Ainsworth-Davies, Guy Butler 1924 United States Commodore Cochran, Alan Helffrich, Oliver MacDonald, William Stevenson 1928 United States George Baird, Emerson Spencer, Frederick Alderman, Ray Barbuti 1932 United States Ivan Fuqua, Edgar Ablowich, Karl Warner, Bill Carr 1936 Great Britain Frederick Wolff, Godfrey Rampling, William Roberts, Godfrey Brown 1948 United States Arthur Harnden, Clifford Bourland, Roy Cochran, Mal Whitfield 1952 Jamaica Arthur Wint, Leslie Laing, Herb McKenley, George Rhoden 1956 United States Charlie Jenkins, Louis Jones, Jesse Mashburn, Tom Courtney 1960 United States Jack Yerman, Earl Young, Glenn Davis, Otis Davis 1964 United States Ollan Cassell, Michael Larrabee, Ulis Williams, Henry Carr 1968 United States Vincent Matthews, Ron Freeman, Larry James, Lee Evans 1972 Kenya Charles Asati, Hezahiah Nyamau, Robert Ouko, Julius Sang 1976 United States Herman Frazier, Benjamin Brown, Fred Newhouse, Maxie Parks 1980 Soviet Union Remigijus Valiulis, Mikhail Linge, Nikolay Chernetsky, Viktor Markin 1984 United States Sunder Nix, Ray Armstead, Alonzo Babers, Antonio McKay 1988 United States Danny Everett, Steve Lewis, Kevin Robinzine, Butch Reynolds 1992 United States Andrew Valmon, Quincy Watts, Michael Johnson, Steve Lewis 1996 United States LaMont Smith, Alvin Harrison, Derek Mills, Anthuan Maybank 2000 United States Alvin Harrison, Antonio Pettigrew, Calvin Harrison, Michael Johnson 2004 United States Otis Harris, Derrick Brew, Jeremy Wariner, Darold Williamson

into a navigation bar like this (current version of template:Footer Olympic Champions 4x400 m Men)

Please see template:Navigation bar for usage information. -- Rick Block (talk) 01:35, 26 October 2006 (UTC)

It doesn't seem to work in Internet Explorer 7. I just see the title with very thin (i.e. couple of pixels high) body with a horizontal scrollbar underneath. Tra (Talk) 01:48, 26 October 2006 (UTC)

Yep, it's working now. Tra (Talk) 02:37, 26 October 2006 (UTC)

DANGER: BAD IDEA – Before taking the leap with this template read my argument here. ...Or try using the navbox example above for more than five seconds. —Down10 ^TACO 06:06, 26 October 2006 (UTC)

Also, the template is non-printable. -SharkD 07:36, 27 October 2006 (UTC)

The same section was created in the beginning of this month, then moved to a discussion page. I read it again and I'm completely OK with one thing I saw there : users hate horizontal scrolling. Please consider this. -- DLL ^{.. T} 18:20, 27 October 2006 (UTC)

Screen real estate isn't that important to me on wikipedia. Especially at the end of the page. I'm fine with a big block, but all these busy boxes with their wheels and knobs and pulley-things just make a mess of a page. We're aiming for simplicity, which is why we don't usually use frames or textboxes in the first place. That's some nifty code, but I don't think it's apropos to wikipedia. -Monk of the highest order 01:09, 6 November 2006 (UTC)

Adding a link to the Cheatsheet in editing-mode helpnotes?

I'd like to propose we add a link to Wikipedia:Cheatsheet, in the editing-mode layout, next to the "Cancel | Editing help (opens in new window)" links. eg:

Cancel | Editing help & Cheatsheet (opens in new window)

Friends of mine who only edit very occasionally, have expressed frustration concerning finding reminders for basic wikicode easily (eg piping links); and are either daunted-by or disdainful-of the size/complexity of the Help:Editing page.

Thoughts? --Quiddity 06:25, 29 October 2006 (UTC)

Cross-posted from Wikipedia:Village pump (proposals)#Adding a link to the Cheatsheet in editing-mode helpnotes? who suggested I bring it up here too. Please give feedback there. Thanks :)

Thoughts ? Strong support! Alas, there's so much to know : you still have to learn few by few. Did you try Wikipedia:Starter toolset : it's huge and still not enough. -- DLL ^{.. T} 20:39, 30 October 2006 (UTC)

That starter toolset page horrifies me ;) I pity the newcomer that gets directed towards it. Utterly overwhelming and unorganized.

But, the Introduction and Tutorial are getting good, and the cheatsheet and Help:Contents menu span the edges (of simplicity vs in-depth). :) -Quiddity 04:48, 1 November 2006 (UTC)

Strong support. I'd actually rather see Cheatsheet replace "Editing help," with a link on editing help to advanced help, but this'll do as well ;) --Wolf530 18:58, 4 November 2006 (UTC)

Seems to have strong support, where do I ask for this to be implemented? Thanks. --Quiddity 20:00, 8 November 2006 (UTC)

Metatags

How does the wiki software decides what to use for the "description" and "keywords" metatags? ≈ jossi ≈ t • @ 02:22, 30 October 2006 (UTC)

As with most operations, MediaWiki works via a combination of sweat, blood and tears, and the enslavement, torture and forced labour of thousands of magical creatures, including but not limited to, pixies, fairies, gnomes, cute little squirrels and decapitated trout. The trout have the most important job; they are responsible for rendering the edit buttons. 164.11.204.56 04:28, 30 October 2006 (UTC)

Very funny. Now, does anyone knows how MediaWiki creates metatags? ≈ jossi ≈ t • @ 16:41, 30 October 2006 (UTC)

It doesn't create a description metatag AFAICT. The keyword metatag is simply a collection of all outbound internal links from the page. (I don't know this for certain; this is a guess based on the HTML source code for this page now and other HTML sources I remember.) --ais523 17:34, 30 October 2006 (UTC)

Actually, I think it does. For example, take a look at the Google result for jew (it's the first thing I thought of). Under the Wikipedia link result is the text "Discussion of the difference between Jewish religion and ethnicity, with notes on the Jews' history, beliefs, and culture.". I assume that this is created by the MediaWiki software. —Daniel (‽) 20:53, 4 November 2006 (UTC)

In case you think this is only for popular articles, if you look up lemur the text reads "Encyclopedia gives a brief description of the physical traits of this animal.". It does sound computer-generated, but I'm interested in how the software does it. —Daniel (‽) 20:57, 4 November 2006 (UTC)

But, it seems elephant doesn't. Bizarre. —Daniel (‽) 20:58, 4 November 2006 (UTC)

No extension downloads and messed up pages? What's going on?

If it makes a difference, I'm using IE6

Whenever I click on a new article or page, it asks for me to download a file of the same name and it has no extension. If you save it or cancel it, nothing happens on the page. Click on the link again, and it works as usual. Also, this doesn't always happen.

With the same randomness, hitting the back button will often cause the page to become black with a few characters on it. I went back a few more, and it was fixed. Forward back them, and the problem was gone. Later, the same thing happened. Here's one example: �?���? Try and edit this. There will be a series of spaces that don't appear on the page. When you backspace the spaces well ahead of the characters, the charcters and the spaces begin to go. And yes, the spaces came with the copy for some odd reason. I'm going to try clearing my cache...Going back the pages that did this works now, but it may just be the randomness. Can anyone tell me what this is?

Go to my preferences > Editing and untick 'Use external editor by default'. That article name you provided does not appear to be a valid article. Are you sure you gave the correct name? Tra (Talk) 17:58, 30 October 2006 (UTC)

Snow White also believed that seven up was a drink. Try something stronger. -- DLL ^{.. T} 20:29, 30 October 2006 (UTC)

It is unchecked. And I didn't give any article names, are you sure that was meant to be for me?

Frankly, I like IE. I've used Firfox, but I never really liked it. Even if I did want it, my dad would never let me install it. Yeah, I know, it's sad that my dad won't give me admin privledges on my own computer. On another note, the weird downloads are popping up again. It happened when I clicked the link to this page, in fact. I saved and opened it with Notepad, but it was just the same useless text my computer can't read that I gave you before, but slightly different. Each page seems to be different. Does anyone else have this problem or have any idea how this might be happenning? --RockMaster 01:06, 31 October 2006 (UTC)

Firefox doesn't require admin privileges to install. IE doesn't work properly with most websites these days anyways, so no reason to keep using it. — Dark Shikari ^talk/_contribs 19:11, 1 November 2006 (UTC)

Are you talking about XP Home, or XP Pro? If it's XP Pro, then the Power User group can do so. With XP Home, the only other user group besides Administrator is Restricted User. There are some programs, however, such as Google Video, that do not access WINDOWS32 or Program Files. Is Firefox one like this? And as far as I know, IE will work for most sites. --RockMaster 22:42, 4 November 2006 (UTC)

If there are concerns about privileges, then something like Mozilla Firefox - Portable Edition could be used. --TheParanoidOne 13:57, 5 November 2006 (UTC)

Sorry, I must have misunderstood you. I assumed that �?���? referred to the name of the article, rather than the contents of the download. Do you get the same results if you try to edit the pages both when logged in and when logged out? Tra (Talk) 01:15, 31 October 2006 (UTC)

That's alright, no harm done. Never tried logging out, but it would be tough to tell. It appears so randomly, and clearing the cache does make it stop for a while. The error of the page as a whole showing up as gibberish text hasn't appeared since I cleared my cache. I wish I could program a nice bot to go to pages a lot quicker than I can, to see if that glitch really stopped or if it's just occuring less. The file does not pop up as much, as oppossed to every single time now as well. --RockMaster 02:19, 1 November 2006 (UTC)

This issue appears to be the same as the one being discussed elsewhere on this page at an annoying alert appears everytime when i browse wiki page...... --Rob.au 14:58, 1 November 2006 (UTC)

If bugzilla:1109, this should be fixed again as of a few minutes ago. --brion 22:40, 5 November 2006 (UTC)

No, it's not. That's in Firefox, and it asks to download index.php, not an extentionless file with the name of the page. If someone can tell me how to upload pictures here, I can give you screenshots of what the file and pages look like. --RockMaster 00:10, 7 November 2006 (UTC)

This phenomenon just happened to me too. It was doing that to me a couple of hours ago. Not on all pages — just on a few (maybe just one). It was consistent which page was doing it — most were not. The page that was mostly doing it to me was a redirect page, and I noticed that the "what links here" listing for its destination was not including that page either. I then logged in with a user ID and the phenomenon disappeared (possibly a coincidence) and did not reappear when I logged out again. I'm using IE 6, but I think that was probably not the source of the problem (because of the "what links here" issue). —131.107.0.73 01:46, 10 November 2006 (UTC)

Incidentally, this seems to be the same problem reported here —131.107.0.73 02:00, 10 November 2006 (UTC)

Please accept my apologies. I take back everything I said above about "what links here" having a problem. I hadn't noticed the "next 50" link at the end of the list of links - there were just so many links to the article that the redirect page I was looking for was not in the first 50. Sorry for the noise. (The problem that I experienced has not reappeared since I logged in and logged back out again.) —131.107.0.73 02:12, 10 November 2006 (UTC)

Favorites?

Since we can make profiles on the site, wouldn't it be a nice add on for us so have favorites? For example, I found the page about the real Dracula and I'd like to share it with my friends.

Just an idea, but I think it's a good one

That's what del.icio.us and other "bookmark sharing" sites do, I think we should stick to just making a ensyclopedia. --Sherool (talk) 12:12, 30 October 2006 (UTC)

You can always wikilink to favourite articles from your user page or talk page. DuncanHill 17:48, 30 October 2006 (UTC)

I add them to my watchlist, so that some time later they appear for me and I am reminded of why I searched for them in the first place. This also solves my habit of adding things to a favourites list and then never looking at them again. —Daniel (‽) 20:44, 4 November 2006 (UTC)

Larger text

All tex on Wikipedia seems to have gotten a lot bigger on my computer. It doesnt happen on any other sites, and it's really annoying. Can someone help me?--Andy mci 18:04, 31 October 2006 (UTC)

I once had the same. Check out your preferences. Try also to click View, find the font size option and change it. --Brand спойт 20:39, 31 October 2006 (UTC)

You can also check "View" > "Text Size" in IE. ---J.S (t|c) 18:35, 2 November 2006 (UTC)

Thanks, that worked--Andy mci 16:42, 3 November 2006 (UTC)

Experiencing some problems

I hope someone can give me a clear explanation on some of the problems I have been facing surfing Wikipedia recently. Firstly, allow me to present the technical aspects of my PC. I am using a Pentium II PC (512MB) with a Firefox browser (Version 2.0) to surf and edit this website. In some of the webpages, I am unable to load the pages correctly. For example, the article on Leicester City F.C. shows up a completely blank page after taking quite a long time to load up the page. I have experienced similar problems with some of the article and other namespace pages as well. Thankfully, the problem seems to be relatively rare but it still causes me a considerable amount of frustration as I am unable to do any editing on these pages. I am using a broadband connection speed of 1 500kbps presently. Does anyone know the cause and solution to this problem? Any help here would be greatly appreciated. --Siva1979^{Talk to me} 04:32, 2 November 2006 (UTC)

When you see that happen, try refreshing the page. It might be a problem with the network. Tra (Talk) 18:42, 2 November 2006 (UTC)

Which OS is it? Which wikipedia skin? Assuming you're using monobook, that article uses some fractionally sized fonts (1.3 em, and 90%) and, curiously, xx-small, whatever that is. Perhaps your machine is unable to do font scaling, or doesn't have. Another possibility is that somehow it is being rendered white on white. After it finishes rendering a blank page, can you select anything? Can you paste it? — EncMstr 21:07, 2 November 2006 (UTC)

My OS is Windows ME and I am using the default skin, MonoBook. Yes, after it finishes rendering a blank page, I can go back to the previous page or my home page. --Siva1979^{Talk to me} 01:09, 3 November 2006 (UTC)

Bigger category should list all subcategories on first page

section copied from Wikipedia:Village pump (proposals)#Bigger category should list all subcategories on first page.

When one goes to a big category (having more than 197 pages e.g. [[Category:Cities and towns in Uttar Pradesh]]) one can see only first 197 individual pages list and to see other pages in this category one have to navigate further but since typically number of subcategories are quite small they should be shown on first view/page itself. Vjdchauhan 11:32, 1 November 2006 (UTC)

I agree. At the moment, to force this, you have to find all the subcategories and pipe sort them to the front by using '*' or ' ' or something similar. In some of the larger catgories, it is quite possible that some subcategories are genuinely lost. Carcharoth 01:25, 2 November 2006 (UTC)

I agree as well, and since so many of the categories already use the piping "workaround", I wonder if this wouldn't be something that would be a valued change to the software. Who would we ask? - jc37 01:31, 2 November 2006 (UTC)

I'd raise it on the technical area of the village pump. I'll do that now. Carcharoth 10:36, 2 November 2006 (UTC)

End copied section.

Can anyone here suggest whether this is feasible and what to do next? Carcharoth 10:38, 2 November 2006 (UTC)

Vote for Mediazilla:1211, and/or bug someone who's good with MySQL optimization to submit/commit a patch for it. —Simetrical (talk • contribs) 01:06, 3 November 2006 (UTC)

Appearance of non-Roman scripts

Not sure if this is the right place to post this. Many Wikipedia pages link to the same article in other languages, and I'd like to be able to see what those languages are. I can interpret Deutsch and Polski but not தமிழ் and ܐܪܡܝܐ . Likewise, there are many links to different Wikipedias on [1]. Does a way exist to see what these languages are? Ideally, I'd like to hover and have the name come up in English. Any ideas? BrainyBabe 15:26, 2 November 2006 (UTC)

If you are just after the Wikipedias then m:List of Wikipedias is what you want. If you just want to see the cool languages though, then something like List of ISO 639-1 codes might be useful. --TheParanoidOne 20:20, 2 November 2006 (UTC)

They are both cool tools, and thanks for bringing them to my attention, but neither does what I want it to. I'd like it to be evident to every reader, and obviously most won't know to look here. Also, it requires scrolling through lots, and scrutinising unfamiliar scripts, and trying to estimate if the one you are curious about looks like the examples given of Persian or Thai or whatever. Perhaps someone else will pick this up. BrainyBabe 20:44, 2 November 2006 (UTC)

Interlanguage links are designed to be comprehensible to speakers of the target language, not speakers of the current language. While it might be interesting to know whether the page exists in Thai or Devanagari, it's not very useful if you can't actually read the script, and if you actually care you can mouse over the link and look up the code. On the other hand, someone who knows little to know of the current language should be able to determine whether the page is written in their native language as easily as possible. —Simetrical (talk • contribs) 01:09, 3 November 2006 (UTC)

Yes, that makes sense, to prioritise the native speakers of each language. I was thinking more of curiosity than of strict usefulness, although it is useful to know if a page on (for example) corruption exists in (for example) Arabic or Farsi. How does one "look up the code"? I can see it displayed at the bottom of my screen when I hover my mouse, but what do I do then? BrainyBabe 12:25, 3 November 2006 (UTC)

I've made a javascript tool that converts local language names in the sidebar to the English version of those names. To use it, put {{subst:js|User:Tra/sidebartranslate.js}} in your monobook.js. Tra (Talk) 00:54, 4 November 2006 (UTC)

I just enter the code into the search box. The disambig page will invariably have a pointer to the appropriate language. —Simetrical (talk • contribs) 02:22, 5 November 2006 (UTC)

Thanks for both of those suggestions. I don't know what a javascript tool is; I know this is a technical page but, as I said, I may be asking in the wrong place (ie I think I am in over my head!). I did look up javascript and realised it wasn't what I needed. The second suggestion worked for me, but again, it will only work for those who think of it, which won't be most visitors to Wikipedia. I'll leave it at this, but if anyone has any practical ideas for how to make these non-Roman scripts also give the name of their language in English, that would be fantastic. Thanks again. BrainyBabe 15:02, 9 November 2006 (UTC)

For all you people getting 'download file' messages with Firefox or IE

It's happening to me on Firefox 2.0 too.

It come up once every 3 or 4 times I go on a web page on Wikipedia however, I have some idea what's going wrong.

For me, a message pops up on Firefox's (FF) new 'Save file' screen, under the name of a MIME plugin, 'application/octet-stream'. MIME plugins are content types which tell your browser what to do with a file, in this case, Wikipedia. Usually with web pages, the class is text/html. With Wikipedia I think also uses text/html. Basically, this appears as .htm or .html file extensions. List of MIME types. This application/octet-stream appearing for users of IE and FF can be caused by the following file types: .*, .bin, .class, .dms, .exe, .lha and .lzh. Now, you may be familiar with .exe files. This could mean that a (possibly malicious) code has been put on the site, trying to launch itself, however I do not think this has happened.

What may have happened it that the general 'class' file has had something changed, or a file has been given a .* extension or something else. It could be the browser, changes in the MediaWiki versions not spotted by test.wikipedia - endless number of things even a virus. The fact it is appearing on multiple people's browsers means it isn't a one off situation. --TheTallOne 21:26, 2 November 2006 (UTC)

If bugzilla:1109, this should be fixed again as of a few minutes ago. --brion 22:39, 5 November 2006 (UTC)

Inline citations – software?

I recognize the value of providing inline citations, but what a pain in the ass to edit by hand. Any recommendations for software which can automate the process? Even better, Macintosh-based software? Peter G Werner 02:33, 3 November 2006 (UTC)

Something like this: (diff) ? (SEWilco 05:39, 3 November 2006 (UTC))

I agree that at first they seem tedious and unproductive. However, after doing 4-5 articles, it stopped seeming so difficult. Now a minimal citation of <ref> {{cite web | url = URL | title = TITLE }} rolls off finger tips with ease. One thing which helps me to keep track of things is to format the wikitext for readability:

Some long statement of fact needing a citation.<ref name="deis"> {{cite web
 | url = http://www.fs.fed.us/r6/mthood/projects/timberline-express/Appendices/Appendix%20G%20-%20Timberline%20Mountain%20Specifications%20Summary/Appendix%20G%20-%20Timberline%20Mountain%20Specifications%20Summary.pdf
 | title = Appendix G: Timberline Mountain Specifications Summary of Draft Environmental Impact Statement for The Timberline Express Proposal
 | format = pdf
 | pages = 2, 8
 | publisher = [[United States Forest Service|USFS]]
 | date = March 2005
 | accessdate = 2006-09-18
}} </ref>  Next statement of fact, probably needing citations as well....

(This example is from Magic Mile, an article I generously cited.) — EncMstr 06:03, 3 November 2006 (UTC)

Template:Navigation

Moved here from Template talk:Navigation: The hide tab resides snugly to the left of the header text, turning it into "[hide]Nordic Council", whatever that might be (Nordic Council in hiding?). Also, the v·d·e navbar, already problematic as it dislocates the header to off-center, unnecessarily takes up its own line. Can anyone fix this? This template is rolled out all over the place. Thanks, trialsanderrors 06:20, 3 November 2006 (UTC)

Image:F11-tiger.jpg

I don't know if im at the perfectly right place, but i will try :-) The Image Image:F11-tiger.jpg was first uploaded to en.wiki and then moved to commons, unfortuneatly without any source information. Since it was deleted 6 Aug 2006 for an sysop it should be possible to have a look if the local description page contained any information. if not, would you be so kind to ask the uploader. IMO, it looks like selftaken photo. Thanks --schlendrian •λ• 10:16, 3 November 2006 (UTC)

cvs.sourceforge.net should not be used any longer

SF says:

As per our document on CVS usage, https://sourceforge.net/docman/display_doc.php?docid=29894&group_id=1, cvs.sourceforge.net should not be used any longer. (ref: [2])

So links to cvs.sourceforge.net will have to be deleted or changed to new correct links --88.226.231.207 10:41, 3 November 2006 (UTC)

It looks like the majority of the 151 links can remain the same because they are on article talk pages, user talk pages and archived pages of various types, where it is not that important that the links won't work. I am kind of puzzled why many of the links were made in the first place. Does Wikipedia have some kind of connection with SourceForge? Also, has it become common knowledge amongst open source software writers that a good way to promote your software is to create a Wikipedia article on it, do we just have an incredible amount of open source software enthusiasts at Wikipedia or is there another explanation for the enormous number of SourceForge software articles? -- Kjkolb 11:33, 3 November 2006 (UTC)

A huge number of highly notable projects are on SourceForge, and are thus represented also on Wikipedia. — Dark Shikari ^talk/_contribs 14:54, 3 November 2006 (UTC)

How do you remove the "+" tab at the top of a talk page?

I have a makeshift footer at the bottom of my talk page. But people keep clicking on the "plus" tab at the top of the page which creates a new subheading below my footer! How can I fix this problem?   The Transhumanist   10:48, 3 November 2006 (UTC)

according to Help:Magic words, this is impossible --schlendrian •λ• 10:59, 3 November 2006 (UTC)

Rather than remove the "+", there's a way using CSS to create a footer that is not physically at the bottom (which I first saw on a version of user:Interiot's talk page). I've done this with your footer. -- Rick Block (talk) 14:17, 3 November 2006 (UTC)

please check the article Royall Tyler (academic)

Hello, I'm posting here because this article has content about someone called "Richard Davis", yet nothing like that is visible in the edit history or in the edit window. Could this be a database error, or maybe a hack? --Kyoko 13:56, 3 November 2006 (UTC)

I checked the history and I don't see references to Richard Davis. The only explanation is some kind of cache error. If that is what happened, it has cleared up. RJFJR 16:09, 3 November 2006 (UTC)

I went through the history myself, and saw no sign of the mysterious edits, yet it was in the version that I saw earlier. I refreshed my own cache, so it must have been on the server side, or at least, not on my end. In any case, it's gone now. Thanks for looking into it. --Kyoko 17:11, 3 November 2006 (UTC)

The information was added in this edit to template:academic-bio-stub. It wasn't completely reverted until 3 hours and 32 minutes later with this edit . Graham87 05:19, 4 November 2006 (UTC)

Underlined links

There's probably some CSS hack for this? When I'm logged in, all links are underlined; when I'm logged out, they're simply blue. I'd prefer the latter behavior even when I'm logged in. >Radiant< 15:23, 3 November 2006 (UTC)

There's an option on the preferences. --cesarb 21:14, 3 November 2006 (UTC)

nepali pages needs more care

To Whom It May Concern

the pages in Nepali Language that wikipedia covers are erroneous and completely incomprehensible. The grammatical errors are so numerous that I cannot find a single word spelled correctly. Sentence syntax, punctuation and cohesiveness are all missing. Is it the fault of fonts, softwares or writers. Can't we(including me) do something for getting it right.

Binod Keshari Poudel Imadole-5, lalitpur Nepal

Could you list some pages? There is a procedure to tag an article as needing work but we need to first realize which page needs work. Thank you. RJFJR 16:06, 3 November 2006 (UTC)

I think he's talking about pages in the Nepali language. There aren't exactly a lot of people who speak Nepali here on the English wiki. Suggest recruiting those who speak it and are interested in wikis to fix the Nepali wiki pages. Rlevse

Users who speak Nepali can be found at Category:User ne. Starting your search there might help. EVula 19:20, 4 November 2006 (UTC)

Rm '/wiki'

I know this would represent a huge change, a whole lot of confusion, and millions of broken links all over the internet but I'll throw it out there anyway. Isn't there a way to change all URL's from...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Page_name

to

http://en.wikipedia.org/Page_name

And wouldn't this make more sense and be more user friendly? Just a suggestion. --Anthony5429 16:33, 3 November 2006 (UTC)

I do too, however the developers don't. :( Lcarsdata (Talk) 17:08, 3 November 2006 (UTC)

I think /wiki/ is there to make sure the pages in the wiki don't conflict with other pages in the domain. However, if you do make a mistake and visit the page without /wiki/ in it, you will be redirected to the page you want. Tra (Talk) 17:58, 3 November 2006 (UTC)

I don't think there is any directory data at the level which would conflict if the /wiki/ were not there. Also, if you remove the /wiki/ it doesn't work in Firefox 2.0 or IE 6. What web browser are you using, Tra? Thirdly, I am pretty sure I have seen the method for doing this explained in mediawiki documentation. Again, no big deal at all because as I mentioned more bad would almost definately come out of such a move than good. --Anthony5429 19:32, 3 November 2006 (UTC)

I'm using Internet Explorer 7. What I mean is that, under the current configuration, if someone mistakenly goes to http://en.wikipedia.org/Page_name, they will see a page telling them it's the wrong place and that redirects them to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Page_name in four seconds. As for conflicting with non-wiki pages, index.php is one that would conflict, since removing the /wiki/ would mean that whatever's at w/index.php would not be accesible properly. Also, extensions such as query.php would have the same problem. There may be more problems if extra functionality is implemented in the future. It is possible to change the setting somewhere in the configuration, because I'm sure there's a wiki somewhere that uses it, but as for Wikipedia, this would probably just create a load of problems and break a lot of bots etc. Tra (Talk) 20:29, 3 November 2006 (UTC)

Actually, I'm pretty you wouldn't have to worry about index.php, etc., since those are in the w/ subdirectory (I think). You would run into issues if we had an article named w/index.php, of course, but that strikes me as unlikely, and anyway I suppose we could just rewrite absolutely everything instead of just most things like now (e.g., Foo?action=edit rather than w/index.php?title=Foo&action=edit). —Simetrical (talk • contribs) 02:36, 5 November 2006 (UTC)

This has been discussed before (on the mailing list IIRC); there are some article titles which conflict with "magic" files which must be located at the root, like for instance robots.txt (/robots.txt) and favicon.ico (/favicon.ico). There's no way to predict all possible future special filenames; having the articles on their own separate namespace avoids the problem. To help people who mistakenly forget the /wiki/, there's a 404 handler which creates an automatic redirection page to the correct URL (it cannot be a simple HTTP redirect for technical reasons). --cesarb 21:10, 3 November 2006 (UTC)

Here is an example of a MediaWiki wiki with a null article path and null script path -> Wikiality. It was imported to Wikia recently, and at the request of the founders the article access was left root for the domain. Note that both robots.txt and favicon are (experimentally) unreachable. See also m:Using_a_very_short_URL. --Splarka (rant) 08:24, 4 November 2006 (UTC)

The thing that can't be a simple HTTP redirect for technical reasons is page redirects, not redirects for URL's without the wiki/. I'm pretty sure that the latter are deliberately not simple HTTP redirects so that people won't link to or rely on them. —Simetrical (talk • contribs) 02:36, 5 November 2006 (UTC)

I think your right, because http://en.wikipedia.org/foo used to just do a (simple) HTTP redirect http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/foo. (this was a while ago). Bawolff 23:28, 7 November 2006 (UTC)

Template optimisation

I've created a template to convert between various units of length. So far it can convert between 9 different units (and I plan to add more) in any combination, then I added some "aliases" to make the template more robust, that is it doesn't care if you type in "metre" or "meters" or just "m" and so on, however to do this I basicaly have to duplicate the code a bunch of times in a switch statement, since all these combinations can be combined in any way the code is getting rater large with lots of redundancy, and the more units (and aliases) that gets added it becomes more and more cumbersome to edit. Anyone know of some neat tricks to help optimise things like this? The only thing I can think of is to call various redirecting meta templates, but I understand that's a bit of a no-no... Template is {{length conversion}} by the way, use for example like so: {{length conversion|from=meters|to=furlongs|value=300}} wich outputs: Template:Length conversion. It works ok, just getting a bit stressfull to update, any help would be welcome. --Sherool (talk) 19:29, 3 November 2006 (UTC)

Also is there a performance issue with loading a 120+K template for something like this? --Sherool (talk) 19:36, 3 November 2006 (UTC)

Hi Sherool! Great template! I've made some changes, mostly spelling and allowing for unnamed parameters, but it looks great! I'll check it out now to see if I can limit the file size. Well done! —Mets501 (talk) 19:58, 3 November 2006 (UTC)

OK, here's my total changes. It's down from 120kb to 40kb now! —Mets501 (talk) 20:21, 3 November 2006 (UTC)

Yes, there is a performance issue; that's why there's a limit on the total size of the transcluded templates before the parser stops transcluding any new templates. Huge templates like that will hit the limit sooner. --cesarb 20:58, 3 November 2006 (UTC)

(In reply to Sherool) Especially read [3]. I've left a note on Template talk:Length conversion. Please consider avoiding such monster templates. --Ligulem 23:13, 3 November 2006 (UTC)

I trimmed it down further (about 20Kb) and it still seems to work as well as ever. Is there any recomended maximum size on templates? As I understand it the 1Mb thing is a hard limit on the sum of all transclutions per article. --Sherool (talk) 01:27, 4 November 2006 (UTC)

Correct, which means that you can include this about 50 times tops per page, and that's assuming no other transclusions. I think you'll find that's rather limiting. Templates were never intended to be a programming language, and still aren't. A new ParserFunction would be much better for this. —Simetrical (talk • contribs) 02:40, 5 November 2006 (UTC)

Templates were never intended to be a programming language, but #expr was intended for unit conversion. You just need to make one small template for each conversion, instead of merging them all together with a huge #switch. Yes that requires N^2 templates, but who wants to know how many chains are in a furlong anyway? Just create templates for the common conversions. -- Tim Starling 03:44, 7 November 2006 (UTC)

Wikipedia Project Assessments/Bots

I was recently in correspondence with the Version 1.0 team in their CORE subjects threads discussing the need for an adjustment to be made for a current Bot organizing/updating WikiProject Assessments (Quality/Importance). I was directed to identify the BOT discussion bard. Is there a general BOT page that I can be directed to so I can continue this thread in the appropriate location? Internazionale 21:13, 3 November 2006 (UTC)

Wikipedia talk:Version 1.0 Editorial Team/Index is where most discussion about Mathbot's assessment work wakes place. --Salix alba (talk) 01:10, 5 November 2006 (UTC)

Sucrose Solubility in Propylene Glycol

Where can I find Sucrose solubility data in Propylene Glycol (10-100C)?

Try asking at the Reference desk. Tra (Talk) 18:07, 4 November 2006 (UTC)

Any way to ignore salted pages?

I was bored, and as often happens, playing around with Special:Random. However, it brought me to Dawn of the Dude, which isn't really an article. I don't suppose there's any way to force it to ignore pages like this, is there? From what I understand, it pulls from anything in the main article space, so it may be impossible.

And, of course, this may not even be that big of an issue. Of all the times I've used the random page, this is the first time I've run across a deleted article. EVula 23:20, 3 November 2006 (UTC)

I was going to say that there is no way to avoid it, but then I got to thinking. Redirects are not picked by Special:Random right? So if we made all salted pages into redirects they would not show up on randompages, they would also not be counted as articles to be included in {{NUMBEROFARTICLES}} and such either I believe. If we changed {{deletedpage}} redirect tagged pages to themselves the article is marked as a redirect in the database, but you don't actualy get redirected anywhere (obviously), only downside is the big "redirect" arrow on the top of the article... --Sherool (talk) 01:48, 4 November 2006 (UTC)

Any such attempt would be forced to rely on unintended behavior which could change at any time. And, as you say, it's ugly. Better, on the dev side, to just allow protection of deleted pages. —Simetrical (talk • contribs) 02:45, 5 November 2006 (UTC)

• Some admins prune SALTed pages with some regularity to keep the number down. >Radiant< 23:31, 5 November 2006 (UTC)

One way which it could be acheived without hard-codeing particular categories into the software is having a list of categories to avoid somewhere in the MediaWiki namespace. Special:Randompage could then check articles against this list to exclude them. --Salix alba (talk) 17:16, 6 November 2006 (UTC)

Where does article go on a #REDIRECT?

I wrote an article called Parchman Farm which apparently got redirected to Parchman Penitentiary and (I guess) to Mississippi State Penitentiary. The Parchman Farm article (now disappeared0 had to do with an important court case Gates v. Collier that I wrote in conjunction with it. It had information that has nothing to do with Mississippi State Penitentiary. Is there any way I can get the information from Parchman Farm back? Isn't everything supposed to be kept somewhere? I just don't know how to find it. Thanks! Mattisse(talk) 01:45, 4 November 2006 (UTC)

When you get redirected to another article, there is a small link to the original article under the topic name. Click that, which will take you to the original page. From there, you can see the history. EVula 01:49, 4 November 2006 (UTC)

You mean here?[4]? But I still can't figure out how to get any information on the Parchman Farm article. Mattisse(talk) 04:04, 4 November 2006 (UTC)

Hmm, well that is what I was talking about. When did you write it? It seems like it was deleted (and then the redirect was created), but it doesn't look like there was an AfD; you'd need an admin to check to see if there's a deleted version sitting around in the history somewhere. EVula 05:23, 4 November 2006 (UTC)

There doesn't appear to be any article history for Parchman Farm before it was a redirect, there are no deletes or moves for the article that I can see, nor can I find any previously deleted revisions to view, however browsing your editing history I note that you've edited Parchman (which you created here, and there are links there to legal cases. Is there any chance you were thinking of the wrong article? Hopefully that's of some help to you. ~Kylu (u|t) 05:28, 4 November 2006 (UTC)

Incomplete reversions

Take a look at these edit histories:

• Sengkang's reverts [5][6] at argon (page history)
• JoeSmack's revert [7] at mercury (element) (page history)

According to the edit summaries, those reverts were to the correct versions. But checking the diffs between those revisions, there got another vandal edit inbetween. The article content that was ultimately saved is not the content that was (presumably) supposed to get saved by the revert edit.

Technically, if I save an old version (assuming I don't do a section edit) while another edit was done (section edit or not), this should either completely overwrite those previous edits, or raise an edit conflict, not integrate that edit into mine, right? The users above use different editing tools so it's likely not a bug in only one of those tools. Any ideas how to prevent this? That's two cases of missing sections I've come across in two days now. Femto 14:35, 4 November 2006 (UTC)

What I think it might be is that, taking taking the JoeSmack example, the last vandal edit (changing the Hatting section) was actually made after the revert (which is why JoeSmack's edit summery says he reverted 2 edits). Because the two edits were made so close together, MediaWiki for some reason made an error with the timing and put them in the wrong order. I've seen this happen with bots such as User:AntiVandalBot as well, which also reverts pages very quickly after the vandal edit. Tra (Talk) 18:04, 4 November 2006 (UTC)

For reference, the exact timestamps (with seconds included) can be found here and here. I don't think the revisions are just in the wrong order: every revision is attached the editor name, so this would imply that JoeSmack has saved a page with vandalism on it. Tizio, Caio, Sempronio 21:05, 4 November 2006 (UTC)

New Template?

What do you think of Template:Clarifyme which expands to  ? I made it because I kept finding thinmgs that weren't factual errors, weren't prevalent enough to throw something over the whole article, but which were so unclear that I couldn't fix them Adam Cuerden ^talk 20:41, 4 November 2006 (UTC)

Need help with code

Does anyone have a clue what to write in your personal .js or .css code to make it display the text, similar to the one in the top of the contributions page, when clicking on a user name, e.g. in some discussion? I mean, I would like to see this text: (Talk|Contribs|Block|Block log|Logs). MoRsE 21:13, 4 November 2006 (UTC)

To show other people these links, you could use {{vandal}} which, when you put {{vandal|Tra}} gives Tra (talk · contribs · deleted contribs · nuke contribs · logs · filter log · block user · block log).

To see these links when someone else links to a user page, you could use popups where you will be able to hover over the link to the user page to get a list of accociated links. Tra (Talk) 21:31, 4 November 2006 (UTC)

Thanx! The popup code works really neatly! MoRsE 00:27, 5 November 2006 (UTC)

Are all images on USA government web sites in public domain?

Are all images on any USA government Internet web site in the public domain? For example, on USA Environmental Protection Agency sites, or Department of Energy sites? If they are, what license should I select when uploading them into Wikipedia? Thanks for your help. - mbeychok 00:14, 5 November 2006 (UTC)

Most are, but some are not. Some are licensed works that the government site uses. You need to check out the licensing listed on the page or on the home page of the site. User:Zoe|(talk) 02:00, 5 November 2006 (UTC)

DOE labs are often run by contractors rather than regular federal employees. As a result almost none of the content from some DOE lab sites is in the public domain. See Template_talk:PD-USGov-DOE for more on that issue. Dragons flight 02:15, 5 November 2006 (UTC)

Messed up <ref> citations in Hiralal Sen - help needed

Help. I was editing Hiralal Sen, noticed that most of the inline ref code was duplicated lots of times [8], and then removed most of it [9]. Now reference number 2's text is missing and I can't figure out what went wrong. I reinserted the accidentally removed template, emptied my cache but to no avail. Can anyone double check I did things correctly? Kavadi carrier 11:37, 5 November 2006 (UTC)

Fixed a botch. References must be defined on first occurrence. Current implementation of the m:cite.php extension requires this. --Ligulem 12:26, 5 November 2006 (UTC)

Saving index.php problem?

What is the problem if a user gets messages like these:

You have choosen to open
index.php
which is a: php-file
from: http://sv.wikipedia.org

Would you like to save this file?

or:

You have choosen to open
Special:Recentchanges
which is a: application/octet-stream
from: http://sv.wikipedia.org

Would you like to save this file?

when trying to read Wikipedia in Firefox? Not every time but about one time out of ten. Is it a problem with Firefox or is it an error in Wikipedia? /81.229.40.212 11:38, 5 November 2006 (UTC)

You need to disable "Use external editor" in your preferences. -- Lost^(talk) 11:44, 5 November 2006 (UTC)

I've been seeing the same sporadic problem in IE, and have been assuming it is some sort of problem at Wikipedia's end. (PS. In reply to Lost, I do not use an external editor.) Dragons flight 11:50, 5 November 2006 (UTC)

If bugzilla:1109, this should be fixed again as of a few minutes ago. --brion 22:38, 5 November 2006 (UTC)

Problem with Wikipedia:Special:BrokenRedirects

moved here from User talk:Jimbo Wales - the wub "?!" 12:50, 5 November 2006 (UTC)

I am contacting you since this seems to be an issue with the site iself. When bad redirects on te list are removed, thy are no longr crossed out. Instead, besde the page, a new link appears that says Category:User cello. This just startd happening last night November 3. ihope that you will be able to fix this for us. Thanks, --Willy No1lakersfan (Talk - Contribs) 16:00, 4 November 2006 (UTC)

It's fixed now, obviously just a very strange temporary problem. the wub "?!" 18:13, 6 November 2006 (UTC)

This is a problem again. I found out that the source of the problem was that the category was deleted, so I put something in the category page so it wxisted again. Now the category was deleted once again and the problem has reoccured. Please help with this problem...--Willy No1lakersfan (Talk - Contribs) 12:57, 7 November 2006 (UTC)

OK this is weird. All the deleted pages in Special:Brokenredirects show up as "redirects to Category:User cello" (a category deleted at UCfD) even though all of them were probably not redirects to that category in the first place (e.g. National Association of Condo Hotel Owners, About long island, and Weapon X (musician) all appear like that). Only non-deleted pages are struck out when fixed. I'd say this could be ignored, but right now it is making this Special page quite useless. Only a few non-deleted redirects show up as "fixed". Kavadi carrier 04:43, 8 November 2006 (UTC)

Update... is someone trying to run a bot to fix these and simply redirecting everything to a random page? The current redirect is to Adberrahim Goumri! SkierRMH 02:11, 10 November 2006 (UTC)

Baroque Architecture

the Baroque architecture page says "poop head" but I cant figure out how to delete it.

It's been deleted now. For instructions on how to remove vandalism in the future, see Help:Reverting. —Mets501 (talk) 15:07, 5 November 2006 (UTC)

Laaaag!

Ok, for the last week or so, Wikipedia has been lagging like crazy for me. Is anyone else getting it? All other websites are perfectly fine, no lag whatsoever. But on here, I have to make several attempts to make a page start to load, more often than not it just sits there for five minutes before timing out. I'm using monobook, just the godmode light rollback tool (nothing else), I have WinXP, P4 3GHz, 1Gb RAM and 2Mbit ADSL over a net connection sharing WLAN. I am getting entries in my system event log from 'Browser', 'NetBT' and 'MrxSmb' which seem relevant:

• Browser

The browser was unable to promote itself to master browser. The computer that currently believes it is the master browser is [NAME].

• NetBT

The name "MSHOME :1d" could not be registered on the Interface with IP address 192.168.1.65. The machine with the IP address 192.168.1.66 did not allow the name to be claimed by this machine.

• MrxSmb

The master browser has received a server announcement from the computer [NAME] that believes that it is the master browser for the domain on transport NetBT_Tcpip_{E0BD5EB2-992D-43D9-A3. The master browser is stopping or an election is being forced.

([NAME] refers to one other computer on the network, which has the IP 192.168.1.66. My machine is 192.168.1.65.) These errors have been occuring to no apparent ill effect for longer than a week, but they haven't caused any perceptible problem and MSHelp just says not to worry about it. Then again, no other websites I happen to try do this. I've tested the computer on the network i'm calling [NAME] for lag - no problems with it, so it's just restricted to my PC. I've also pinged rr.knams.wikimedia.org; average time was 35ms - the other machine took an average 33ms. Sorry if everyone already knows about this, or if should be posting at WP:RD/COMP, but it's getting really annoying now. Thanks, CaptainVindaloo ^{t c e} 17:38, 5 November 2006 (UTC)

Those event log messages are related to Windows local-area networking and the "Network Places" network browser, not your web browser. Zetawoof^(ζ) 21:27, 5 November 2006 (UTC)

Image question

Image:WIMap-doton-Chippewa_Falls.png won't seem to display 200px or 250px, but will display 150px. Seems like I've seen this before, but I don't remember the fix. Is this a server issue, or an image issue. I've tried two different browsers and I get the same thing. --Dual Freq 21:50, 5 November 2006 (UTC)

It seems to be displaying correctly to me. If you get these sorts of problems, try purging the image (e.g. for this image, you would visit http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Image:WIMap-doton-Chippewa_Falls.png&action=purge) and clearing your cache. Tra (Talk) 22:24, 5 November 2006 (UTC)

I tried the purge and cache thing earlier and multiple times. It now appears to be working, maybe the purge took time to work. I tried it maybe 15 min before I posted this. Sorry for the bother. --Dual Freq 22:30, 5 November 2006 (UTC)

extra buttons in the edit toolbar

As requested at MediaWiki talk:Monobook.js I have (re)added several extra buttons to the Edit toolbar. Could several people verify that:

1. pressing the "make table" button/using the "make table" feature does not crash Internet Explorer. (This was previously reported, but supposedly fixed.)
2. while loading the images of the edit bar (which now takes slightly longer on slow Internet connections) you can already start editing on every browser/system configuration.
3. it does not cause any JavaScript warnings/errors, delays or other problems.

Regards, —Ruud 23:27, 5 November 2006 (UTC)

Pressing "make table" does crash IE6 for me, but doesn't crash FireFox; Windows XP, Broadband connection. You can start editing while the toolbar loads, and I don't get any js errors. —Mets501 (talk) 00:05, 6 November 2006 (UTC)

It only crashes after I clear my cache. Once I attempt to open it and it crashes, if I attempt to open it again it works. If I then clear my cache it crashes again. —Mets501 (talk) 00:08, 6 November 2006 (UTC)

In Internet Explorer 7, clicking the 'Make table' button causes a square shaped window to pop up, which has the URL about:blank and then the whole browser hangs. Tra (Talk) 00:17, 6 November 2006 (UTC)

I'm trying it again and it's working. I didn't see any javascript errors by the way, and the buttons loaded too fast for me to see if it's possible to type whilst they are loading. Tra (Talk) 00:22, 6 November 2006 (UTC)

OK, crashing IE6 is a pretty serious bug (arguably a bug in IE, but I don't think a new editor with a fresh cache will care whose fault it is.) I've removed the table generator and replaced it with a button. —Ruud 00:49, 6 November 2006 (UTC)

By the way, the 'Insert block of quoted text' button appears twice, for some reason. Tra (Talk) 01:00, 6 November 2006 (UTC)

My fault... it's gone now. —Ruud 01:28, 6 November 2006 (UTC)

Web 3.0 Glitch?

I clicked on the Special:Random button for fun and it took me to Web 3.0, a protected deleted page. Are protected deleted pages accessible when clicking Special:Random, or is this a glitch? -WarthogDemon 05:16, 6 November 2006 (UTC)

See #Any way to ignore salted pages? a few threads up ;) --Quiddity 05:19, 6 November 2006 (UTC)

Possibly a bug

OK, I've found a username which breaks the {{unsigned}} template. The name is E. Sn0 =31337=. Let me show you:

{{unsigned|E. Sn0 =31337=}} yields: — Preceding unsigned comment added by [[User:{{{1}}}|{{{1}}}]] ([[User talk:{{{1}}}#top|talk]] • [[Special:Contributions/{{{1}}}|contribs]])

{{unsigned|Patstuart}} yields: — Preceding unsigned comment added by Patstuart (talk • contribs) .

{{unsigned|E. Sn0 =31337=|06:09, 6 November 2006 (UTC)}} yields: — Preceding unsigned comment added by 06:09, 6 November 2006 (UTC) (talk • contribs)

{{unsigned|Patstuart|06:09, 6 November 2006 (UTC)}} yields: — Preceding unsigned comment added by Patstuart (talk • contribs) 06:09, 6 November 2006 (UTC).

Hmm, looks like a problem with the unsigned template, right? Well, that's the catch: I think it has more to do with Wiki's {{{1}}} argument; it's unable to recognize his username. This sounds like a bug; do you guys know if anyone else has reported it to Mediawiki, and do you think it's worth a report? -Patstuart^{(talk)(contribs)} 06:11, 6 November 2006 (UTC)

That's no bug. It's because the username has the equals sign in it which is what MediaWiki takes to be a parameter to the template. You can force it to display as expected using {{unsigned|1=E. Sn0 =31337=}} which shows — Preceding unsigned comment added by E. Sn0 =31337= (talk • contribs)

And please don't start all the <nowiki> lines with a space, they make the lines look horrible. Kavadi carrier 06:30, 6 November 2006 (UTC)

Um, yeah, I originally put the lines in because I wanted it to be monospace, but you're right, it's ugly. I'm not sure that feature doesn't need to be changed. -Patstuart^{(talk)(contribs)} 19:10, 6 November 2006 (UTC)

To put lines in monospace, you can also use <code> tags, e.g. <code>This is a test</code> gives This is a test Tra (Talk) 19:47, 6 November 2006 (UTC)

Watch Special Pages

Is there a way to add Special:xxx/yyyy to my watchlist? I ask because I've been going through disambiguation pages and changing all internal links so that they point to the right place, but of course, people continue adding ambigous links that I then have to change back. If I could add, eg Special:whatlinkshere/The_end to my watchlist, then I'd be notified every time a link needed disambig-ing. Which would be useful. --User24 14:40, 6 November 2006 (UTC)

I believe the answer is no since special: pages are generated and have no timestamp that could be put in the database record corresponding to your watchlist. If I'm understanding what you want to do, the best solution I can think of would be to write a script you could run from your PC to access Special:whatlinkshere for a list of article names and manipulate the output to find what you're looking for. I have written a number of scripts that do various things more or less like this and would be willing to help if you'd like (although not for the next two weeks or so). -- Rick Block (talk) 14:59, 6 November 2006 (UTC)

Yeah that'd be awesome; let me know when you have some time free, thanks. --User24 15:02, 6 November 2006 (UTC)

"Bad Article" template

I know this sounds silly, but I get very annoyed when I see an article that has more than 2 templates at the top, eg here (and I'm sure there are worse offenders), especially when some of the templates are redundant (of course the factual accuracy is disputed if there are no citations; why do we need both templates on one page?).

So I'd like to suggest a "bad article" template. The main article can then have this one template, and all other relevant templates can go on the talk page. The template would read something like:

This article has significant problems in multiple areas.
Please see discussion on the talk page for further details.

(I'm not really suggesting it be called Template:Badarticle, maybe Template:Workneeded or Template:Problems )

To reiterate, I'm not suggesting that we get rid of X, Y or Z template, rather that I think there's a point where multiple templates should be moved to the talk page, and this template placed on the article instead.

Comments please. --User24 14:53, 6 November 2006 (UTC)

If you create a template like that, it would simply be added on top of the relevant templates, making the list even longer. See also {{toomanyboxes}} (deleted on TfD) and Wikipedia:Huge message boxes. --cesarb 15:22, 6 November 2006 (UTC)

well, hopefully people adding this template will move the existing templates to the talk page, but I can see that becoming a potential issue..

If so, perhaps there could be a bot that scanned pages that have this template, and moved other templates to the talk page. --User24 16:45, 6 November 2006 (UTC)

This is actually a policy question, not technical. Anyway, I am opposed to the idea. The number of templates at the top of an article is a good indicator of the number of problems an article has, and moving these to talk somehow hides this. Tizio, Caio, Sempronio 17:57, 6 November 2006 (UTC)

Bot idea

I've come up with an idea for a useful bot, and I think I have the Perl chops to implement it, but could use some help - particularly an example of a successful Perl bot that I can use as a template. The idea is to fix basic English word errors, starting with replacing "predominately" with "predominantly" (do a search for the incorrect "predominately" and you'll see how widespread the problem is). As I said, I'm willing to do the heavy lifting, but could use some help to get me started. Thanks! | Mr. Darcy talk 17:05, 6 November 2006 (UTC)

User:Pearle. However, spelling-fix bots aren't a good idea when automatically run. --ais523 17:10, 6 November 2006 (UTC)

Thanks. What's the issue with spelling-fix bots? I'd characterize this a little differently - I'm not trying to spell-check everything, but would want to convert a specific mis-spelling to the correct one. "Predominately" isn't a word, but eliminating it by hand would be a major task. Anyway, if this is something that isn't done on Wikipedia, I'm not going to push it. | Mr. Darcy talk 17:37, 6 November 2006 (UTC)

While most of the corrections would be correct, still some would be wrong and made then hard to correct. See Wikipedia:Bots#Spell-checking bots for details. Tizio, Caio, Sempronio 17:45, 6 November 2006 (UTC)

Also Wikipedia talk:Bots#Spellchecking has some discussion on the issue. Tizio, Caio, Sempronio 17:55, 6 November 2006 (UTC)

Thanks, I'll take the discussion over to that page. I see exactly one objection - that such a bot would correct errors in quotations - and as I stated over there, this shouldn't be an issue because errors in quotations should be followed by [sic]. | Mr. Darcy talk 18:22, 6 November 2006 (UTC)

A) [sic] is infrequently used, so you couldn't rely on it. B) It's not the only time when the "misspelled" form of a word might be the intended one. For example we have misspelling, list of common misspellings in English and other pages which include intentional examples of misspelled words. Even if 99% of the corrections are appropriate, the 1% that aren't would be so hard to identify after the fact, that the community does not allowed automatic spell checking bots. Dragons flight 18:44, 6 November 2006 (UTC)

Objection A is a problem with Wikipedia, not with the hypothetical bot. The use of [sic] should be obligatory, otherwise editors will manually "fix" those errors over time. Objection B is easily surmounted with an excluded-page listing. As I said, if it's not allowed, I'll respect that, but I do not find these counterarguments convincing. | Mr. Darcy talk 18:51, 6 November 2006 (UTC)

Most contributors will not "fix" quotations. Further, there is in fact no consensus on the usage of [sic] at all, since some contributors feel it calls unneccesary attention to misspellings in a way that is disparaging to the original and prefer to just ignore errors appearing in quoted material (as most magazines do, for example). Unless you can find a way to systematically address the quotation issue first, there is no hope for such a bot. Dragons flight 19:03, 6 November 2006 (UTC)

We'll have to agree to disagree on sic. An automatic spellcheck bot could also identify quotations by the use of " or other quotation marks (like the << marks found in some Spanish-speaking countries), or by avoiding errors in italicized text. Anyway, what would a "manually-assisted" bot entail? | Mr. Darcy talk 19:24, 6 November 2006 (UTC)

Manually assisted means a human reviews every edit before it is made. Other than that, how much or how little automated assistance is involved is up to the bot operator. Dragons flight 19:37, 6 November 2006 (UTC)

WP:AWB (manually assisted bot) already has an option to fix lots of common typos defined here. Martin 19:42, 6 November 2006 (UTC)

I've made the suggested addition on that list's talk page, thanks. | Mr. Darcy talk 20:23, 6 November 2006 (UTC)

Faulty watch-list

I'm currently watching the following page: Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Vikram Rai. The AfD was closed down earlier today, yet the change does not appear in my watch list (though it appears correctly when I display/edit the complete list). I've tried unwatch and watch, but it still doesn't work. I don't need to watch it any more, but I'd like to know if the problem is with me or Wikipedia. As far as I can tell, all my other watched items appear correctly. — Tivedshambo (talk) 18:48, 6 November 2006 (UTC)

This is a known issue with page protection/unprotection changes. --brion 19:05, 6 November 2006 (UTC)

You have new message?

Since when was the alert for messages ungrammatical? Adam Cuerden ^talk 19:16, 6 November 2006 (UTC)

It's been fixed; I think an admin was playing with it, and it got changed back. -Patstuart^{(talk)(contribs)} 01:18, 7 November 2006 (UTC)

Specify namespace for "What links here" pages?

I work on disambiguating links to dab pages. I don't generally bother with links to dab pages from anything other than mainspace. It would be very convenient if there were a way to specify what namespace I want links from when looking at "What links here" for the dab pages I work on. Is there any way to do this that I don't know about, and if not, is it something that could be implemented? :-) --Tkynerd 01:03, 7 November 2006 (UTC)

Possibly something at WP:TOOLS. I seem to remember AWB being able to do something like this, but maybe not. At the very least, I think the links are arranged by namespace when the index has been updated. Unfortunately that doesn't happen very often (on the order of weeks). Carcharoth 01:12, 7 November 2006 (UTC)

There is also this which will give you the pages linking to Guernsey that are in the article namespace. As you would see if you click on the link, it's in more of a machine readable format so for it to be useful, a script would need to be written to make it presentable. Tra (Talk) 01:16, 7 November 2006 (UTC)

This is bug 4624.--Commander Keane 01:55, 7 November 2006 (UTC)

Thanks, all. At WP:TOOLS I did find this, which doesn't solve the namespace problem but looks like it does make the disambiguation task easier. So that's good. :-) --Tkynerd 02:31, 7 November 2006 (UTC)

Actually, that software does solve the namespace problem. It includes a checkbox for "0 namespace only." It's exactly what I needed; many thanks to Carcharoth for the tip. --Tkynerd 04:39, 8 November 2006 (UTC)

I use firefox's text-search highlighting. (ctrl-F, search for word, highlight all) Makes skimming down a long list really easy. --Quiddity 02:43, 7 November 2006 (UTC)

How does that help you ignore several different strings (Talk:, User:, User talk:, Wikipedia talk:...)? --Tkynerd 02:50, 7 November 2006 (UTC)

Sorry, mis-read. I'm usually fixing project-space dbl-redirects, which this is useful for. Carry on :) --Quiddity 19:18, 8 November 2006 (UTC)

Vertical alignment in a div header

Is there any way to make a div tag use vertical text alignment with a NavHeader as seen here? I've tried "valign:center", "v-align:center", and "vertical-align:center", as well as many other things but nothing seems to be working. I'm just looking to have the top bar, that is visible when the window is not expanded, not be v-align:top. Thanks. --MZMcBride 01:27, 7 November 2006 (UTC)

The "vertical-align" CSS property is for arranging inline elements proportional to each other, not to the boundaries of the parent object (except for table cells). In practial language: it doesn't do what you want. The relationship of it to the "text-align" css element (and the and "valign" parameter) is counter-intuitive. Try "padding-top:.4em;" on the inner div. Also, if linking to one of the sandbox templates, you can directly link to the old version -> [10]. --Splarka (rant) 08:32, 7 November 2006 (UTC)

It doesn't work. Use tables. Yes, it's non-semantic, but there is literally no way to get reliable vertical alignment without using tables in CSS2. The W3C website even suggests it. —Simetrical (talk • contribs) 03:28, 8 November 2006 (UTC)

Image thumbnail problem

First of all, we have followed the different advices at Wikipedia:Purge. However, we could not get Image:Courier.jpg to be purged, more specifically, the 200 pixel thumbnail. Other thumbnails, like the 199 pixel one, is correctly generated.

Is there another way to force the thumbnail recreation? The problem was raised at Template talk:Infobox Album#Image bug?. Thanks in advance. -- ReyBrujo 04:14, 7 November 2006 (UTC)

I'm seeing this problem as well. I've tried every trick in the book, but I can't get the 380px thumbnail for this image to regenerate even though the image was replaced a day ago. Is anyone looking into this? Kaldari 17:52, 7 November 2006 (UTC)

This problem occurs when squid has cached an error page with the URL of a thumbnail, but the page is not purged with action=purge because the thumbnail does not exist. The solution is to request the thumbnail with an unusual URL, say by appending ?1 to the end. The thumbnail will hopefully be generated. Then do action=purge to delete the cached error. You should only do this if you have tried an ordinary action=purge and it hasn't worked. -- Tim Starling 07:17, 8 November 2006 (UTC)

That worked, thanks! -- ReyBrujo 17:05, 8 November 2006 (UTC)

Thanks, Tim! I have updated Wikipedia:Purge#For_images with your instructions for future reference. Please look over it and correct anything that looks amiss. Kaldari 21:22, 8 November 2006 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Picture of the day/November 7, 2006

Why isn't this image coming up? The direct URL to the image is [11] and all I get is text, so something is screwy here. howcheng {chat} 04:56, 7 November 2006 (UTC)

Interesting, it is the same problem I reported just above... -- ReyBrujo 05:12, 7 November 2006 (UTC)

Hmm, this one seems to have fixed itself. ::shrug::. howcheng {chat} 17:36, 7 November 2006 (UTC)

piston cooling system

please explain about piston cooling system with air suspension which is used in MAN KSZ type enginee My Email ID is jegadesh77/at/yahoo/dot/com

Try Wikipedia:Reference desk/Science, here we talk about technical issues with Wikipedia/MediaWiki, not engines. --Sherool (talk) 09:30, 7 November 2006 (UTC)

Template auto-hide

How can I make a template appear to be collapsed or hidden as its starting state when an article page is loaded? I specifically want to modify Template:Paraphilia this way, as it may become quite large in the future. Thanks. Robotman1974 10:01, 7 November 2006 (UTC)

{{hidden}}. --ais523 10:34, 7 November 2006 (UTC)

Look at user:Kylu. Her user page has several templates that do just that. Actually the second template, user:kylu/main is the wrapper around the main course. — EncMstr 10:37, 7 November 2006 (UTC)

Hmmmmm... Looking at the code for Kylu's userpage makes my eyes hurt. That {{hidden}} tag looks like exactly what I'm asking for... but how do I use it? Robotman1974 10:48, 7 November 2006 (UTC)

Parameter 1 is the title of the box

Parameter 2 is what appears inside the box; you normally need to type '2=' before it; see the edit screen for this section.

• bg1 is the heading background-colour ('cyan' in this case)
• bg2 is the body background-colour ('yellow' in this case)
• ta1 and ta2 are the text-alignments for the heading and body (I've used 'center' and 'left'; note the American spelling)

Thanks for the template example Ais523. That will definitely help in the future, but I still can't figure out how to work the hidden/1/2 deal into Template:Paraphilia. Could someone maybe leave an example using that particular template on my talk page? Robotman1974 20:36, 7 November 2006 (UTC)

Please do not do this -- make content hidden by default. This feature does not work in all browsers, so the content cannot be revealed. Show/hide is fine if shown by default. John Reid ° 09:42, 10 November 2006 (UTC)

layout problems

I rarely but regularly notice layout problems on WP that cause text to be hidden by images. Sometimes they exist in both Firefox and IE (e.g. on Category:History, "Category:History by city" is partially covered) and sometimes only in FF (on http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Egyptomania&oldid=80966972 Egyptomania#Race_and_national_identity the first two lines don't stay to the left of the picture and the second line is truncated after "or Asia, or within the".) Is there an FAQ that deals with these problems? --Espoo 10:15, 7 November 2006 (UTC)

I can't see it on both articles, since my font size is different from the default, but I think I know what you are talking about (the top or bottom of the image is over part of a line of text). This happens because the browsers don't correctly calculate the overlap between the text and the image; there's no way I know of to avoid it (other than moving the images to a different place and hoping it works in all possible font sizes). --cesarb 14:29, 7 November 2006 (UTC)

The Firefox bugzilla entry for this is bug 41412. --cesarb 14:36, 7 November 2006 (UTC)

Issues with Wikipedia:Special:BrokenRedirects

I bring this question up again because I fixed it but is broken again. The pages containing broken redirects that were deleted are no longer crossed out on the list. Instead, they say that they point to a broken redirect of Category:User cello. This is because that category was deleted. I replaced this category and it temporarily fixed the problem. Now the category is deletedagain and the problem exists again. Could somebody look into getting this fixed? --Willy No1lakersfan (Talk - Contribs) 13:04, 7 November 2006 (UTC)

Don't create a category just to work around a software problem. It wasn't a "fix", it just made the problem appear to disappear. See also #Problem with Wikipedia:Special:BrokenRedirects above. Kavadi carrier 04:52, 8 November 2006 (UTC)

Strange search behaviour

I'm finding some strange behaviour on the search page.

When searching for "Communism" the first match is "Communications"!

"Communism" itself is way down the list.

Why is this? I'm thinking perhaps it's related to the way the root of the word is used to generate near-matches?

Will

132.185.144.122 13:19, 7 November 2006 (UTC)

The search software is Lucene, which computes a match based on the contents of the entire article not just the title. The search index treats various words as the same (communications and communism must be two like this), and since "communications" appears in the communications article more times than communism appears in the communism article, communications gets a higher score. -- Rick Block (talk) 01:31, 8 November 2006 (UTC)

Oh, okay. So it's a feature, not a bug! But shouldn't the first page in the list be the page that exactly matches the search term though? The current system seems to make it slightly more difficult to find what you're looking for. (Because, in fact, why should communications and communism be treated the same when they're not related at all?) Will 132.185.240.122 10:02, 8 November 2006 (UTC)

This is a bug in Wikimedia's mwsearch module, the module which calls Lucene. I'm attempting to fix it. -- Tim Starling 05:08, 10 November 2006 (UTC)

SVG TextPath

File:Alfa Romeo.svg

Hi

Please can some help me figure out why the the text path in Image:Alfa_Romeo.svg does not show?

Gary van der Merwe ^(Talk) 20:04, 7 November 2006 (UTC)

Arial Black is not installed on the servers, convert it to a path. —Ruud 20:38, 7 November 2006 (UTC)

Oh - is there a way I can see what fonts are on the server? Gary van der Merwe ^(Talk) 20:47, 7 November 2006 (UTC)

I think the real problem is: [12]. If the font is not there - it falls back to another font. Gary van der Merwe ^(Talk) 21:36, 7 November 2006 (UTC)

Edit option on all pages....

The edit option on all of the pages is pretty dumb. I recently changed information on a page and it was left like that for about a week. This "tool" could be potentially dangerouse to all Wikipedia users. I sugest that you get ride of this iption or find away to make it more... safe. By the way, I kindly went back and changed teh information back to its origanal form before I did my little "test." —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 64.255.109.142 (talk • contribs) .

Try reading this. Tra (Talk) 22:51, 7 November 2006 (UTC)

why are profiles and other non informatory wikipedia sections a wiki?

wikipedia is great, and it is good we can all edit the pages congaing information. but why are the profiles editable by anyone. why is everyone allowed to edit everyone else's profile. i can see why moderates would have this power but all users?? — Preceding unsigned comment added by GreyCell (talk • contribs)

Actually, the ability to edit other's userpages is quite handy when updating userboxes that have been moved.

As for a reason why, I believe it would be exceedingly difficult to create a special editing system just for userpages. It makes perfect sense for it to be the same as everything else, and isn't nearly as problematic as you seem to believe it is. EVula 03:18, 8 November 2006 (UTC)

Should user pages (generally vanity at best) somehow have more protection than what really matters, the articles? Notinasnaid 09:44, 8 November 2006 (UTC)

EVula, I don't think it would be that difficult to make a special system for user pages. The system is already used wher pages in userspace ending in .css or .js can only be edited by the accociated user or an admin. This would just need to be extended to the whole namespace. However, this probably wouldn't be implemented because of the various different reasons to edit other people's userpages. Tra (Talk) 20:50, 8 November 2006 (UTC)

help

i'm new to wikipedia and have no clue how it works, but is my IP address secured and not in the hands of hackers and online predators? also how safe are the articles on wikipedia? I was curious and edited one of the articles by simply adding 1 letter, I was going to change it back, but it was already done. What if somebody changed an article and made it completely false? are we safe? not just our private information, but our knowledge.

please respond back via message or something.

Your IP address is not much use to hackers and online predators. You also send it to every web site you visit. However, Wikipedia does hide your IP address if and only if you register a user name and login to edit. Not sure what you mean by "are we safe" in connection with people making an article false. Notinasnaid 09:43, 8 November 2006 (UTC)

The body is commensal to plenty of germs ; as long as it stays in good health, there is no harm.

WP lives with a door open to plenty of *booh* vandals *booh*, but the organism is healthy and vandalism is seen and corrected quickly. Does that help ? -- DLL ^{.. T} 19:31, 8 November 2006 (UTC)

Is this program supported by the license?

http://earth.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=21422&topic=1141

We are trying to make a historical atlas.--Daanschr 13:45, 8 November 2006 (UTC)

Do you mean, can you use Google Earth images in Wikipedia? Wikipedia requires a license including commercial rights, so those terms are definitely not suitable. Notinasnaid 13:47, 8 November 2006 (UTC)

what about use GE just like (one of possible) external map editors? (you can see my reply to Daanschr 10:33, 6 November 2006 (UTC) at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_historical_atlas)

Tblazko 17:04, 8 November 2006 (UTC)

OK, thanks.--Daanschr 14:20, 8 November 2006 (UTC)

the same questions about nasa www - code already open source http://www.worldwindcentral.com/wiki/World_Wind_FAQ#What_license_is_World_Wind_released_under.3F there are some limits for exported pictures from nasa side too http://www.worldwindcentral.com/wiki/Copyright_Questions_When_Using_Images_From_World_Wind) so probably will not use pictures with satellite images from them just let them (offline) display our map borders at empty globe, show required detail (zoom) and save it like picture. what about limits of such pictures from wikipedia side? Tblazko 18:04, 8 November 2006 (UTC)

is it possible to use php/mysql in wikipedia project?

i'm thinking about storing of map system there for historical atlas project. generaly possible? already exists something storing data in mysql (installed directly at wikipedia.org?) and accessing it using php? any limits? Tblazko 18:04, 8 November 2006 (UTC)

For reasons that should be obvious, it's impossible for anyone but a developer to execute arbitrary code. If you think some kind of software extension would be useful, please propose it at Mediazilla, and perhaps write it (that will certainly help things along, although the path to enabling something on Wikimedia is generally long and difficult unless you're a core dev or highly trusted by one). —Simetrical (talk • contribs) 06:31, 9 November 2006 (UTC)

SVG Fonts

Hi

What fonts can be used for SVG (i.e. what fonts are installed on the servers?)

Gary van der Merwe ^(Talk) 14:51, 8 November 2006 (UTC)

odd behavior when right-clicking on section headers (only)

Using Firefox, I usually right-clink on links and then "Open Link in New Tab". Now all of a sudden right-clicking on section headings and subheadings (only) in Wikipedia takes me immediatly to edit mode. All other links, in Wikipedia or elsewhere, continue as before. I don't think anything's changed on my computer. Anyone else seen this problem? Herostratus 20:19, 8 November 2006 (UTC)

Go to My preferences -> Editing and untick 'Enable section editing by right-clicking on section titles (JavaScript)'. Tra (Talk) 20:45, 8 November 2006 (UTC)

Dang, you're right, wonder how that got set. THANKS! Herostratus 22:42, 8 November 2006 (UTC)

Weird problem updating template

A few days ago I updated template:Germany Bayreuth district to include a link in the heading. Once I did this, it was simple to get Bayreuth to use the new template. But for some reason, I can't get Bayreuth (district) to get the update. I've tried action=pruge, null edits, non-null edits, etc. I don't understand why this page still uses the old version even after two days. -Steve Sanbeg 20:33, 8 November 2006 (UTC)

It's because when the template is transcluded in Bayreuth (district), the link at the top links to the same page that the user is on, and consequently, it appears bold but not linked. Tra (Talk) 20:42, 8 November 2006 (UTC)

Werdnabot

Werdna quit last month but his bot still seems to be working. Is the bot one day going to stop doing its job? Anomo 22:04, 8 November 2006 (UTC)

Werdna continues to actively maintain his bot. He's also now a MediaWiki developer, and is quite active in that role (moreso than I). I don't know if he's left the source code/data with anyone, but if he has it should be easy to keep it running smoothly. —Simetrical (talk • contribs) 06:35, 9 November 2006 (UTC)

Help with wiki code

I'm writing an article about a song Work With Me, Annie that was in the RR hall of fame. I am using some code which I copied from another article which produces the following:

The song " Work With Me, Annie" is part of The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame's 500 Songs that Shaped Rock and Roll list.

The code is {{RRHF500| Work With Me, Annie}} which produces the line above. The problem is that it sticks a little footnote on the end, but the footnote does not show up in the footnotes section of the article. The footnote does not seem to go anywhere and I can't figure out how to either fix it or get rid of it. Any help would be appreciated. Thanks! Mattisse(talk) 22:31, 8 November 2006 (UTC)

Subst-ing the template seems to make it work, so it might be something to do with template transclusion conflicting with the <ref> tags. Tra (Talk) 22:51, 8 November 2006 (UTC)

Thanks for fixing it! Could you explain what "sust-ing the template" means? How did you know what link to put in? And, is there a list of those templates somewhere? Thanks again! Mattisse(talk) 22:57, 8 November 2006 (UTC)

WP:SUBST --TheParanoidOne 23:03, 8 November 2006 (UTC)

Thanks for your answer! (I'll work at understanding what that pages is saying.) Mattisse(talk) 23:25, 8 November 2006 (UTC)

Active Watchlist items

When I make changes on a page, I add it to my watchlist, but sometimes I only want to watch it for a few days to make sure the page is not vandalized again. Would it be possible to create a temporary watchlisting option?

By this, I mean, you could add an item to your watchlist for 3 (or 7) days, after which it automatically would be removed. If you edit the item during the 3 (or 7) days, the item's time on your watchlist would be renewed, so that it would be on for 3 (or 7) days from that point.

One of the benefits is to prevent editor (particularly admin) burnout by automatically removing short-term watchlist items so the editor does not become overwhelmed by a tremendous watchlist that he feels responsible for. This would be especially useful in fighting short-term vandalism on article, which takes up half or more of an editor's tim on Wikipedia.--Chris Griswold (☎☓) 00:28, 9 November 2006 (UTC)

Something you could do (but it is a bit more manual) is create a page like: User:ChrisGriswold/watchlist. When you edit a page, add a link to it there, and remove any more than 7 days old. You can check recent changes of the links on a page by clicking related changes, which would be -> Special:Recentchangeslinked/User:ChrisGriswold/watchlist. Now, if we could just get the devs to add a link to that on Special:Contributions.... --Splarka (rant) 08:34, 9 November 2006 (UTC)

I kinda like that idea. Whenever I go to remove user talk pages I've left various notices on from my watchlist I have a hard time remembering who I want to keep watching and who I just gave a "no image source" notice 3 months ago. The alternative would be to not watch the pages I guess, but sometimes people do reply to these things. Also my browser freeze for about 5 minutes when I click "remove selected items from watchlist" after a manual cleanup, and I "only" have ~8500 items on there. It should not be too hard to do either. Just add a "watch for X days" field next to the "Watch this page" checkbox, if left emtpy it's added permanently while if you type in a number an "expiration date" is added to a new field in the watchlist database. Then have a script remove all "past due" items for the user whenever Special:Watchlist is loaded. --Sherool (talk) 08:41, 9 November 2006 (UTC)

I find checking User Talk pages for replies is best done from my contribs rather than my watchlist. --ais523 09:03, 9 November 2006 (UTC)

I heartily agree. A "watchlist for X days" option would be utterly marvelous. Even if it used a fixed quantity, like 60 days. I wonder if it's possible? --Quiddity 09:52, 9 November 2006 (UTC)

I guess it's possible, but would require a change in the meta:Watchlist table, as every record have to contain the time the entry was added and the time for removal. Tizio 10:57, 9 November 2006 (UTC)

Time of removal would be enough, the system just need to know when to remove the item from the watchlist, not when it was added to it. And yes it would require a database change, but adding new fields is not a huge problem, we just need to file a request for change on MediaZilla, get a few people to vote for it and hope some dev can be bothered to implement it ;) --Sherool (talk) 18:09, 9 November 2006 (UTC)

Good feature. I would use that too. --Ligulem 09:33, 10 November 2006 (UTC)

YouTube videos

Is it possible to embed a YouTube video into a user page? I've tried just pasting in the embed html supplied by YouTube, but it doesn't work. Laurence Boyce 13:39, 9 November 2006 (UTC)

No, I have seen users trying to embed videos before, and never worked. And hopefully, it will never work. -- ReyBrujo 13:52, 9 November 2006 (UTC)

Yeah, while I'm all for intricately designed userpages, embedding a YouTube video is crossing the line. User-space != MySpace. EVula // talk // ☯ // 16:24, 9 November 2006 (UTC)

It's not possible. Wikipedia has disabled embedding files from other sites, because of the risk that vandalism might occur by someone changing the file on the external site. There are also likely to be copyright issues with the video. I suggest you just link to it as an external link. Tra (Talk) 19:29, 9 November 2006 (UTC)

Sharing Photos between Wikitravel and Wikipedia

I have contributed a bit to various articles on hot springs on Wikipedia, and I realized that there is some more information on Wikitravel, including some great photographs. When I went to import a photo, however, it was not the same photo on Wikipedia as on Wikitravel. So they have separate photo repositories? What gives? How does one use a photo from Wikitravel on Wikipedia?--Filll 14:05, 9 November 2006 (UTC)

As I understand it, the only photos one may use across different wikis are those from Wikimedia Commons, which may be used everywhere. Laurence Boyce 17:55, 9 November 2006 (UTC)

Wikitravel is not a Wikimedia project and therefore cannot use images in Commons. The photos will need to be uploaded separately in both projects. Tra (Talk) 19:15, 9 November 2006 (UTC)

Signature Issue--Requesting Assistance

I like to change the color of my signature. How do I do this? Thank you. FactsOnly 13:54, 9 November 2006 (UTC)

Try this. Or this. >Radiant< 14:03, 9 November 2006 (UTC)

I put this, FactsOnly, in the "signature" box under "user profile" within "My preferences." And it gave me this: "Invalid raw signature; check HTML tags." What did I do wrong?

Testing<font color=blue>Facts</font><font color=green>Only</font> 14:11, 9 November 2006 (UTC)

• Do you have the 'raw signature' checkbox set? You should. >Radiant< 14:18, 9 November 2006 (UTC)
  • Yes it is checked and I get "Invalid raw signature; check HTML tags" when I try to save, using this code: FactsOnly
    • I'm not sure what's wrong; I'd suggest asking here. >Radiant< 15:41, 9 November 2006 (UTC)

So I did ask here FactsSolely 15:59, 9 November 2006 (UTC)

Part of the problem is that the HTML code you're using is just plain bad. Here's the code you need:

[[User:Rrfayette|<span style="color: blue">Facts</span><span style="color: green">Only</span>]]

Which gets you:

FactsOnly

Hope that helps. EVula // talk // ☯ // 16:07, 9 November 2006 (UTC)

It does; thank you. Would you also be able to tell me if there is a list of "color codes"? FactsSolely 16:14, 9 November 2006 (UTC)

A couple different resources: [13][14][15] In general, I prefer to specify the actual color rather than generic names, but that's also because I've been making websites for many, many moons. ;-) EVula // talk // ☯ // 16:22, 9 November 2006 (UTC)

You've been given the help you requested, which is good. I'd like to note that there is no policy forbidding colorful sigs but some of us feel they are rather silly and clutter up talk pages. Just an opinion. John Reid ° 09:37, 10 November 2006 (UTC)

"You have new messages on your Wikipedia talk page"

Someone seems to have changed the orange 'new messages' bar, introducing the wholly unnecessary verbiage "on your Wikipedia talk page" (where else would I have new messages for Wikipedia to me telling me about them? my mobile?) Anyway, I know the place to dispute this is wherever the message template that was changed is, but I can't seem to find that - I tried Mediawiki:Newmessages, Mediawiki:Newmessageslink and Mediawiki:Newmessagesdifflink but none of them have been changed in a while. Can someone point me to the right place? --Sam Blanning^(talk) 17:51, 9 November 2006 (UTC)

The page in question is MediaWiki:Youhavenewmessages (probably the best place to look is the MediaWiki namespace RC log). This seems to be coming from a discussion on the policy pump, probably best to discuss it there.--Nilfanion (talk) 17:59, 9 November 2006 (UTC)

Administrator tools on a non-admin account

I hope this is the correct place to ask this, and if it's not please kindly direct me to the correct place. I logged on today and went to the AfD as I do rather regularly. As I was browsing today's AfD's I noticed that under each nomination I have a series of tools that allow me to protect, delete and undelete the article; I have never seen these there before. Now, to my knowledge only administrators are supposed to have these three options. I am not an administrator, and although I may consider attempting to be one in the future I certainly shouldn't have these tools now. However, if this is a general change and all editors now have the ability to protect, delete and undelete articles then that is another problem, and a much bigger one at that. --The Way 23:07, 9 November 2006 (UTC)

Does it keep happening, or was it a one-off problem? Titoxd^(?!?) 23:32, 9 November 2006 (UTC)

It looks like someone's modified the standard template to include links to Special:Undelete/PAGENAME, the protect and delete links (which are just things like &action=protect added to the normal URL), and so on. This doesn't mean that by clicking these links you'll be able to carry out the action - you'll be given an error message and told you don't have permission, or something like that. You only need to worry if "protect" and "delete" tabs start showing up next to "history" at the top of the page... Shimgray | talk | 23:43, 9 November 2006 (UTC)

Alright, thanks. Good to know people aren't randomly getting admin tools; I'd never have used them but I'm sure others would. It still seems that that is a totally unnecessary addition to the standard template that should be removed asap. --The Way 23:45, 9 November 2006 (UTC)

The administrator links are useful to those who close discussions where the outcome is "delete". And there are no security implications - the links just don't work for non-admins, delete or undelete will generate an error while protect will let you see but not change the page protection settings. (Disclaimer: I made the template.) Kavadi carrier 05:56, 10 November 2006 (UTC)

Strange Image in place of Marshall Islands flag

Looking at my user page (Roisterer) just now, I noted that the image of the Marshall Islands flag I have displayed (at 50px) looks nothing like the flag. When I increase the size of the image, it looks fine. Could someone check my page to see if it is just a problem with my computer or not? Here is what the Marshall Islands flag is supposed to look like: . Cheers. --Roisterer 02:49, 10 November 2006 (UTC)

Just as a side note, the image that came up here as the Marshall Islands flag is the image I see on my page, so if you can see the flag then there's a problem at my end. --Roisterer 02:51, 10 November 2006 (UTC)

It looks good here, so I presume it's a problem with your cache. Ironically enough, the image on {{PDFlink}} was busted for me as well until I did a hard refresh. Is anyone having problems similar to these? Titoxd^(?!?) 06:23, 10 November 2006 (UTC)

Shoddy SVG versions

I'm writing to complain about shoddy SVG versions of raster graphics being uploaded, then shoved into articles. Sometimes SVG versions are okay; often they're not. I'm not going to cite specific examples because this will only lead to people defending on a case-by-case basis and taking their work personally. This is a general problem.

Don't download PNG images to your local machine, run them through some sort of car washer, and upload an inferior SVG. You aren't actually achieving anything; the engine will render a PNG to most browsers anyway. You're not saving any storage, since the PNG remains -- and deleting it won't solve anything except to upset the uploader. We're not so strapped for cash that deleting 100 Kb will put us in the money.

SVG is a problem format. It has its advantages, yes. But it handles fonts poorly. It can be used well but I don't like some of the work I see. I create some graphics with a vector editor, Macromedia FreeHand, and rasterize an exported EPS in Adobe Photoshop. If you want to convert the EPS to SVG, I'll gladly make that available. But if you try to re-draw vectors from a raster image, you either need to do a great deal of unnecessary work or you mess it up.

PNG is a fine format for images; unlike GIF, it is completely free libre and there are no fears of Unisys coming to bite our balls over it. If you have nothing better to do with your time and the amazing tools on your desktop, go ahead and see if you can squeeze a few bytes losslessly out of existing PNGs. Please do not replace them with SVGs unless you can show real benefit and no harm. Thank you. John Reid ° 09:27, 10 November 2006 (UTC)

Problem with display of Justice - is it just me?

Hi. The article Justice is currently displaying (for me, at least) in a rather mixed-up way. The text is fine in the editor, but in the article, the first subsection (Virtue or results?) is moved to near the bottom of the page, messing up the referencing. Sorry if this isn't the right place to post this. Cheers, Sam Clark 11:36, 10 November 2006 (UTC)

Fixed. Was old unreverted "vandalism". --Ligulem 12:33, 10 November 2006 (UTC)

Thanks. I wonder why I couldn't see the vandalism in the editor? Cheers, Sam Clark 12:37, 10 November 2006 (UTC)